Britain has spent the last four days celebrating a political institution that, viewed purely through democratic theory, is rather strange.
Queen Elizabeth II has now been monarch for seventy years. She inherited the throne in 1952 because her father was king. She has never faced an election, cannot be voted out and occupies an office that will eventually pass through the same family.
Yet Britain simultaneously considers itself a parliamentary democracy, and there is no real contradiction in the everyday operation of the political system. Boris Johnson governs because he commands a parliamentary majority, not because the Queen selected his political programme. Governments can lose elections while the monarch remains. Parliament legislates. Courts interpret law. Ministers make policy.
The monarchy exists above an electoral system without normally governing it.
That may explain much of its survival.
Constitutional monarchy has produced an unusual institutional bargain: the monarch receives extraordinary status in exchange for exercising remarkably little independent political power.
The more completely the Crown stays outside partisan competition, the easier it becomes for citizens with completely different political beliefs to tolerate or support it.
That is quite different from the usual relationship between power and institutional survival. Politicians normally seek greater authority because authority allows them to achieve objectives. Political parties want control of parliament. Presidents seek larger electoral coalitions. Governments resist institutions that constrain them.
The British monarchy moved historically in almost the opposite direction.
The Crown survived partly because political power moved elsewhere.
That process took centuries rather than one constitutional moment. Conflicts between monarch and parliament, civil war, the execution of Charles I, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, the growth of cabinet government and the gradual democratisation of parliament progressively shifted effective authority towards elected institutions.
The monarch remained.
The political system around the monarch changed almost completely.
This is one reason Britain’s constitution is so difficult to explain through a single document. Much of it operates through statutes, conventions, precedents and institutions whose formal descriptions do not reveal exactly how power works in practice.
The Queen technically possesses substantial constitutional powers through the Crown.
In practice, almost all are exercised according to established constitutional convention and ministerial advice.
That distinction between formal authority and effective authority matters.
Reading the legal architecture alone can make the monarchy look much more politically powerful than it actually is.
The real constraint is often convention.
That sounds fragile. A convention is not necessarily enforced in the same way as a statutory prohibition. Why should a monarch obey it?
Because violating the convention could threaten the institution itself.
This is where incentives produce constitutional restraint.
The monarchy survives partly because the monarch does not attempt to govern.
If a king or queen began openly determining policy, dismissing governments they disliked or campaigning for particular parties, republicanism would probably become much stronger very quickly.
Political neutrality is therefore not merely etiquette.
It is a survival strategy.
The monarch gives up the ability to exercise political preferences publicly in exchange for preserving the institution’s broader legitimacy.
That is a substantial personal constraint.
Imagine occupying one of the world’s most visible public offices while being expected to avoid expressing ordinary political opinions for decades.
Elizabeth II has done that with remarkable discipline.
Whatever someone thinks about monarchy itself, her understanding of the institutional bargain has probably contributed enormously to its durability.
This connects to something I have been noticing repeatedly this year: institutions become stronger when powerful people voluntarily accept limits.
Germany’s democratic transition after Merkel was uneventful partly because Merkel did not attempt to remain indispensable.
Italy’s presidency works partly because Mattarella treats the office as a constitutional referee rather than a personal political platform.
Pakistan’s institutions were tested when Imran Khan attempted to prevent a parliamentary process that threatened his government.
The same principle appears in a completely different form in Britain.
Power restrained can sometimes produce more durable influence than power exercised.
The Queen possesses almost no ability to determine taxation or foreign policy.
Yet she has met almost every major political leader in Britain for seventy years and remains one of the country’s most recognisable institutions.
That is soft institutional power rather than executive power.
It operates through symbolism, continuity and legitimacy.
These things are difficult to measure because they do not appear in government budgets or legislative votes.
They can still matter.
The monarchy gives the British state a permanent symbolic representative who is separate from the temporary politician running the government.
That separation has an institutional advantage.
When Boris Johnson speaks, he represents his government and political coalition.
When the Queen performs a ceremonial role, she is theoretically representing the state rather than a party.
The distinction between state and government can be valuable.
Governments are supposed to be temporary.
States are supposed to persist.
Combining both functions in one elected president can work perfectly well, as countless republics demonstrate. But constitutional monarchy separates them unusually clearly.
That may reduce the extent to which national symbolism belongs to whichever political party currently controls government.
The American presidency provides an interesting contrast. The president is simultaneously head of government and head of state. The person making controversial policy decisions also represents the country ceremonially.
That can make national symbols more partisan because attitudes towards the president affect attitudes towards the person performing both roles.
Britain avoids some of that problem by dividing the functions.
Again, this is not an argument that monarchy is therefore objectively superior to republicanism.
Germany, Ireland and many other parliamentary republics separate head-of-state and head-of-government functions through elected or indirectly elected presidents.
The institutional benefit does not require hereditary succession.
That brings us to the strongest argument against monarchy.
Birth should not determine public office.
Modern democracy rests on political equality: citizens should not possess political authority because of ancestry. Hereditary monarchy violates that principle at the most obvious possible level.
Nobody competed against Elizabeth II for the job.
Nobody will compete against her successor.
The institution therefore survives through an exception to the democratic logic governing almost every other important political office.
Supporters respond that the monarch exercises so little political discretion that democratic selection is unnecessary. If the role is principally ceremonial and constitutional, hereditary succession may actually help prevent the office becoming partisan.
That argument has practical force.
But it does not eliminate the normative problem.
A hereditary institution tells citizens that one family occupies a permanent constitutional position unavailable to everyone else.
The question is whether the benefits of continuity and political neutrality justify that exception.
Different democracies can reasonably answer differently.
Britain currently appears willing to accept it.
There is also an economic argument surrounding royal events that tends to become exaggerated in both directions. Supporters point towards tourism, international attention and the commercial value of the monarchy. Critics point towards public spending and royal wealth.
The relevant economic question is not whether tourists visit Buckingham Palace. They obviously do.
It is the counterfactual.
How much tourism would Britain lose under a republic?
How much would maintaining a presidential head of state cost instead?
How much economic value comes specifically from an active monarchy rather than royal buildings and history that would remain regardless?
Those figures are much harder to establish.
This is a good example of why economic arguments should not be used simply because they produce numbers.
Some institutions are principally constitutional and cultural rather than commercial.
The case for monarchy should stand or fall primarily on whether it contributes positively to Britain’s political system, not whether souvenir shops sell enough Jubilee mugs to cover the Sovereign Grant.
There is also the Commonwealth, which makes the Queen’s role more complicated internationally. Elizabeth II is not merely Britain’s monarch. She remains head of state in several other independent countries, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Those countries are not governed by Britain.
They are sovereign states sharing the same monarch through separate constitutional arrangements.
Yet the symbolism of a British royal family remaining at the top of constitutions across former parts of the British Empire inevitably raises questions about colonial history.
Barbados became a republic last year while remaining inside the Commonwealth.
Other countries may eventually make similar choices.
That should not automatically be interpreted as hostility towards Britain or the Queen.
A country can value historical relationships while concluding that its head of state should be one of its own citizens.
Again, institutions can change without relationships collapsing.
This is where Elizabeth II’s extraordinary personal popularity may actually conceal a long-term institutional challenge.
People can support the Queen more strongly than they support monarchy.
Those are different preferences.
After seventy years, Elizabeth II has become almost inseparable from the institution in public imagination. Most Britons alive today have never known another monarch. She provides continuity stretching from Winston Churchill to Boris Johnson, from the post-war empire through decolonisation, European integration, Brexit and the pandemic.
That personal continuity is impossible to transfer completely.
The next monarch inherits the Crown.
They do not inherit seventy years of accumulated trust.
This resembles the succession problem faced by successful political parties and institutions everywhere.
A highly successful individual can strengthen an organisation while simultaneously making it difficult to determine how much legitimacy belongs to the institution and how much belongs to the person.
Angela Merkel created a version of this problem for Germany’s CDU.
Macron may eventually create one for his political movement.
Elizabeth II may have created it unintentionally for the monarchy itself.
The institution’s real test therefore comes after her reign.
Can constitutional monarchy retain legitimacy when the individual who has defined it for seven decades is gone?
That question is impossible to answer today.
But the Jubilee makes it unusually visible.
There is another reason the monarchy has survived: constitutional ambiguity can sometimes be useful.
Political systems often want precise rules.
Who has authority?
Under what conditions?
What happens during a crisis?
Britain’s constitution leaves some areas governed partly by convention and judgement.
The monarch’s reserve powers exist in the background but are almost never exercised independently.
That creates flexibility.
It also creates uncertainty.
The system works because political actors generally agree not to test the boundaries too aggressively.
This demonstrates how much constitutional government depends on norms rather than written rules alone.
America possesses an enormously detailed written constitution and still depends on norms.
Britain possesses no single codified constitutional document and nevertheless maintains substantial institutional continuity.
Neither system proves that written or unwritten constitutions are inherently superior.
The deeper variable is whether political actors internalise restraint.
A constitution cannot list every behaviour that would damage democracy.
Eventually somebody has to decide not to do something simply because doing it would violate the spirit of the institution.
The Queen’s reign is, in many ways, seventy years of not doing things.
Not endorsing political parties.
Not publicly attacking prime ministers.
Not refusing election results.
Not using constitutional ambiguity to accumulate personal authority.
Those absences are difficult to celebrate because nothing happened.
They may be precisely why the institution survived.
That is also why comparing constitutional monarchy with dictatorship simply because neither head of state is elected makes little sense.
The politically relevant question is not only how someone obtained office.
It is what power that office possesses and how that power is constrained.
An unelected monarch with almost no independent policy authority can coexist with a highly competitive democracy.
An elected president can become authoritarian if elections cease to constrain what happens after victory.
Democratic legitimacy therefore cannot be measured through one institutional characteristic.
It depends on the entire distribution of political power.
Still, monarchy remains an anomaly inside that distribution.
Britain has essentially decided that one unelected institution can remain legitimate because it stays outside ordinary political competition.
Whether that bargain survives another reign will tell us much more about the monarchy’s future than this weekend’s crowds.
For now, however, seventy years is an extraordinary period of institutional continuity.
Elizabeth II became Queen when Britain still possessed a large empire, Joseph Stalin governed the Soviet Union, television was relatively new and European integration was only beginning.
Almost everything around the monarchy changed.
The monarchy adapted largely by refusing to compete with those changes politically.
That may be the paradox at the centre of this Jubilee.
The Queen is one of the most enduring political figures in modern history precisely because she has spent seventy years avoiding becoming a politician.
Perhaps institutions sometimes survive not by accumulating power, but by understanding exactly which powers they cannot afford to use.
